More random stuff

Finished reading the cool Wired spaces issue...including this interesting take by Rem Koolhaas on the Libeskind design, which I kind of like.

Instead of the two towers - the sublime - the city will live with five towers, wounded by a single scything movement of the architect, surrounding two black holes. New York will be marked by a massive representation of hurt that projects only the overbearing self-pity of the powerful. Instead of the confident beginning of the next chapter, it captures the stumped fundamentalism of the superpower. Call it closure.

(Meta note: I typed this in instead of copying and pasting. It felt good. When I saw Billy Collins give a reading, he pointed out that copying a poem out longhand was one good way of making it your own.)

Unrelatedly, I found an easy way to make a hand puppet. Take a sealed envelope (particularly one featuring this week's unappealing Chase bank credit card offer) and tear one side off. Remove contents. Insert hand. Voila. Hours of fun.

Fun with Citeseer

Here's an neat discovery - my paper is the only result when you check citeseer for blogs, like so. And there are only a handful of results for weblogs. Don't try searching for blog, you get a bunch of weird math stuff.

Blues, Blogs

Had dinner with Mike, who has started a blog. Most recently he talked about the types of blogs. I think mine is still a little schizophrenic.

One thing I did want to do was link to this story in Wired which had a chart showing a bunch of blue logos in color space, including the last three places I've spent my time: Yale, NEC, and IBM. Unfortunately, the graphic isn't online. Damn you, Wired! I wonder if I'm destined to only go places with blue logos.

Propaganda

I saw this link to remixed propaganda on a klog apart. I'm a huge fan of this style of art for some reason. Which is why I ordered a propaganda poster calendar from Poland. There's a web page that has some of the images somewhere, but I can't find it at the moment. Also, I have to agree with some of the posters' sentiments.

Another weekend, another beer belly

Hmm, where did the weekend go? Bar-hopping in Cambridge on Friday, including yet another conversation about jdate (if only i were jewish!). Bought Travel Scrabble and played on the T with M....I highly recommend it! You can stop mid game and store everything quite handily since the pieces snap into place.

Also ran into the catalog of guttural moans in comics, which reminded me that I thought a catalog of male and female bathroom signs (given the funky ones you find in Europe) would be fun. I Googled around for one, to no avail...though I did find this comparison of male and female bathroom graffiti. I didn't even know women's bathrooms had graffiti! Mysterious.

Neat

Richard got the stats working for my page, and it turns out that my WWW paper has been downloaded over 1800 times since appearing in Search Day. Pretty cool, if I do say so myself. Update: Susanne just pointed out that it was mentioned in Wired, which is probably the likely culprit for some of this more recent traffic. Wow.

Also, in all the excitement, I forgot to mention that I'd read Stover at Yale. I sort of wish I'd read it a long time ago. It's always weird/depressing to see that people were grappling with same issues a century ago.

Home sweet home

Back, finally, after lots of travelling. And this blog is back, too. The MT import was surprisingly easy! However, I've lost my look and feel. :-( Maybe I'll take my time and come up with something snazzy.

Anyway, Dublin was great. I saw the Book of Kells and the Guinness storehouse (where I think I finally learned the barley+hops+yeast+water = beer formula) and went on the literary pub crawl and met some fun folks from the University of Minnesota, Morris who said that the musical pub crawl had been better. Maybe next time. Also met some interesting people at the hostel, Isaacs. The night before, went partying in Cork. Hopefully, Naomi made it through the day at work okay! The night before that, finally found a club in Budapest! The trick is to ask for a "disco." We ended up Bank, which is near Oktagon, and the music was pretty good, although I got American Life stuck in my head. On Saturday, snuck off for a bit to go to the Gellert bathhouse/spa and climb the mountain to the Citadel and see the Buda castle and Mathias church and whatnot. Didn't get to go to the Statue Park where they have old Communist statues or to Heroes Square. Had a too-expensive dinner where we were overcharged for water. Friday had a good dinner at Cyrano in Pest but then just went back to the hotel bar. Night before that had a cruise on the Danube and the night before that went to the Jazz Garden with a few people. Managed to deliver my presentation without any major disasters. Met lots of cool folks.

Hmm, I'm sure there's a lot I'm leaving out, but since I didn't bring a camera, it's probably all I'll remember. I'm exhausted!